


Can’t Get Enough

by deathishauntedbyhumans



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crying, Drug Addiction, Drug Withdrawal, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Military Backstory, Narcotics Anonymous, Talking To Dead People, Vomiting, Wordcount: 1.000-10.000, no beta we die like ben
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 16:15:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20969405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathishauntedbyhumans/pseuds/deathishauntedbyhumans
Summary: Klaus and Dave meet at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and fall in loooooove. (Or, alternately, falling in love involves a lot more puking than Klaus wants it to.)





	Can’t Get Enough

**Author's Note:**

> I’m going to preface this by saying that I have no practical (or... really any at all) knowledge of NA meetings or... drugs in general, so this is a fun little exploration that I don’t actually know anything about. If I’ve offended anyone, I’m sorry, but it IS a work of fiction on the internet, so take it with a grain of salt. 
> 
> Title comes from Missio’s _Rad Drugz_, which is a BIG Klaus mood.

“My name is Klaus—“

“Hi, Klaus.”

“—and I’ve been sober for… uh, twelve days.”

Being sober sucks  _ ass,  _ Klaus wants to say, staring without seeing at the sleepy faces around him. The room at this community centre has been decorated with tacky posters and motivational quotes that Klaus knows he started reading when he came in. He can’t remember what any of them said now, and his skin is buzzing too much for him to force his gaze up to the walls to see some blown-up picture of Albert Einstein telling him  _ you can do it!  _

“I’m exhausted,” he settles for saying instead, drawing a few weak hums of assent from the less-zombified members of the group. “I’m exhausted, and if I didn’t have rent to worry about, I’d hole up in my apartment and sleep for a year.” He rubs a hand over his face. “God, I miss sleep,” he mumbles into his palm. 

“You’re having trouble sleeping?” The woman who speaks sounds soft and kind. She makes Klaus want to cry and also gouge his own ears out with pencils at the same time, because he  _ hates  _ the people who run these kinds of meetings. Sure, they’re nice enough whenever he tries to drag himself drunkenly back onto the wagon, but they always seem to stare with a thinly-concealed pity when he shows up with his threadbare coat and his unwashed hair and asks for the times that Narcotics Anonymous meetings are held. 

She’s prompting him, Klaus realises as he drops his hand from his sweat-sticky face, because he’s managed to stop talking in the middle of his share. 

“Uh…” he replies intelligently, because how can he even begin to explain _yes, I’m having trouble sleeping because every time I close my eyes I see the mausoleum my shitty abusive father locked me in to hone my powers when I was a kid and oh yeah, by the way, I see dead people? _

Without fail, he always manages to get stuck on the little things at meetings like this. 

“Yeah,” he says, biting the inside of his cheek to avoid sounding as panicked as he feels. “Withdrawal’s a sonuvabitch.”

Surprisingly, that gets a couple of laughs. The teenage girl in the crappy plastic folding chair next to him with a purple streak through her jet-black hair chokes on a giggle, and the man sitting opposite Klaus who looks far too put-together to be sitting in this circle with the rest of the trembling non-junkies chuckles before covering his mouth tastefully with one of his hands. 

Klaus is stupidly proud of amusing them. If nothing else, he knows he’s at least still good for comic relief. 

“Yes, it can be,” the kind-voiced woman (Marilyn? Marcella? Mariah? She’d introduced herself at the start of the meeting, but her name has utterly escaped Klaus now) says with a small, understanding smile on her face. “Thank you for sharing, Klaus. Our doors are always open to you.” 

While he doesn’t doubt the surety of the statement, Klaus  _ does  _ doubt his own conviction to stay clean. Sobriety comes with a resurgence of his powers, which usually means he isn’t able to handle staying sober for long. 

Ben’s curious form, quietly perched on a chair at the far edge of the room, is testament enough to the strength of his abilities at twelve days clean. 

The share passes from him to the teenage girl beside him. 

* * *

“Hey, wait up!” 

Everyone from the meeting is splitting up outside of the community centre after shuffling awkwardly from the building like a group of grumbling ghouls. Klaus catches sight of his reflection in the window of a car and winces. The description is more fitting than he wants to admit. 

“Hold on!”

A hand falls against his bicep. It doesn’t grip, but it does rest there like it had actually intended to find a place against his worn jacket. The hollering voice stops, too, and Klaus realises abruptly that whoever is touching him must have been calling for him to stop, too. 

It’s a strange development. Most of the time, the other doped-up ghouls don’t bother to pay Klaus more attention than they pay anyone else, and the actual ghouls that he can see when he’s not high off his ass (thankfully) can’t actually touch him. 

When he turns, Klaus comes face-to-face with the handsome man from the meeting, the one who had laughed at Klaus’ weak attempt at a joke. (And shit, he’d definitely introduced himself in the meeting, too, but Klaus is zero for two on the whole “remembering people’s names” front today.) 

“...Yeah?” Klaus says. It’s not classy, it’s not cute, and it’s certainly not the right response to being stopped by a handsome, put-together looking guy from an NA meeting. Sue him! He doesn’t usually go looking for anyone to pull when he’s sober! He’s usually too busy fending off the ghosts that like to fuck up his life and fuck with his head, thanks very much. 

The guy doesn’t seem fazed. If anything, the look on his face brightens further as he drops his hand from Klaus’ arm. “You’re Klaus Hargreeves, right?” he asks, and Klaus freezes. 

For a split second, he considers lying. And then, he considers bolting. Maybe both. But he’s too tired to lie and he’s much too tired to run, and this guy doesn’t look like he’s going to pull out a knife and stab him if he gives him a positive response, so… at least the worst possible scenario is off the table. 

“I am,” he replies after a terse, tense moment of silence. 

The expression of the man asking doesn’t change. He just nods with that same cheery half-smile painting his lips and pushes a hand through his short-cropped hair. “Cool, cool. I thought I was going crazy for a minute there. Sorry if I freaked you out, I just… It would’ve bothered me all day if I didn’t figure it out, y’know?” Klaus finds himself slowly nodding the affirmative, even though he has no idea where this conversation is going. He’s pretty sure he’d lost track of it before it had even begun. “You looked so familiar when you walked in, and then you said your name and it clicked. I had to ask.” 

Klaus shivers beneath his jacket. It’s not as cold as it could be for an early fall day, but the breeze is just brisk enough to creep beneath the layers he’s got on and chill him to the bone. That, and he really is suffering from enough withdrawal to down a man as big as… something really large. Luther, maybe. 

The man seems to take Klaus’ silence as his cue to leave, because he shoots a pair of finger guns and another warm —if slightly awkward— smile in his direction and takes a single step backwards. “I’ll see you around, then, Klaus?” 

He phrases it as a question, so of  _ course  _ it takes Klaus a good fifteen seconds to realise that there’s an answer expected of him. He shakes himself out of his stupor and offers the man what he knows is a poor attempt at a smile. 

“Yeah, I’m sure I’ll be back.” He gestures vaguely at the community centre. Obviously satisfied, the stranger nods and turns away. 

Klaus watches his back until he disappears around the corner, and then he finally draws his jacket more tightly around his shuddering frame and ducks his head to turn back in the direction he’d been heading before.

* * *

“ You’re doing so well,” Ben encourages. Klaus flips him the bird with a trembling hand and then spits into the toilet. 

In retrospect, the fact that Klaus hasn’t eaten anything in the past forty-eight hours probably isn’t making his newfound sobriety any easier to handle than it otherwise could be. 

“I hate this,” he croaks. One exhausted arm raises so that he can flush his essence down the toilet, and then Klaus slides as far from the porcelain god as he can manage and curls into a tight foetal position. “I hate this so much, Ben.”

There isn’t much a ghost can do to help out in a living man’s personal hell, but Ben does do his best, to his credit. He sits in front of Klaus, curling his legs beneath his lithe form, and nods sympathetically. “I know. But you’re doing it. And that’s great!” 

Klaus can feel his stomach weakly protesting its new horizontal position, but it doesn’t churn badly enough to threaten his gag reflex again, so he doesn’t bother to move. “Great, schmate.” He pauses, then adds roughly, “I wish I had something.”

“Klaus.” Ben’s voice sharpens. “It’s been two weeks. Don’t ruin it now.”

Klaus lets out a laugh that might be a sob. “Yeah, because  _ this  _ is so much better than being high.” He hasn’t slept in a week, and he hasn’t eaten in two days. If he could trade places with Ben —make  _ him  _ live out the withdrawal, the flashbacks, the shitty PTSD-induced memories— he would, because there was no way being dead could possibly be any worse than this. 

“It’ll be worth it,” Ben says firmly. Klaus doesn’t bother arguing. He knows Ben won’t have any more answers beyond his usual  _ stick it out Klaus _ , and he doesn’t have the energy to fight with the only person he knows that’s remotely on his side. 

Silence reigns in the bathroom. The rest of his apartment is quiet, too, save for the weird bassline of his neighbour’s music that he can vaguely hear through the bathroom floor where his ear is pressed to the tile. 

“You should go back to the community centre,” Ben says out of nowhere, the way he so often speaks. Being dead and communicating with nobody but his deadbeat brother for the past fifteen-some years had stripped Ben of a great many social graces. Letting silence build was one of them. 

Klaus wants to shove his hands over his ears in a childish  _ I’m not listening  _ gesture, but his arms feel too heavy for a gambit with such a small payoff. So he doesn’t, but he  _ does  _ squeeze his eyes shut instead. 

Ben is undeterred. “You’ve gone once already, and you liked it enough,” he coaxes. “Marietta seemed like a sensible woman, and Dave stared at you for half of the meeting. That’s not so bad, is it?”

It takes Klaus an incredibly long time to piece together the people Ben is talking about with the already-fuzzy memories floating around in his own head. Ben waits patiently while he tries to place them, mostly because he’s Ben, and he has no other choice. 

Finally, he cracks open his eyes. Even the shitty light in his shitty bathroom is enough to make his headache even worse. “...Which one was Dave?”

Ben smirks. Klaus hates the triumphant look that’s already shining his eyes. “The hot one in the suit jacket,” he replies without missing a beat. “The one who recognised you as a Hargreeves.”

Klaus groans. “Shut up.”

“What!?” Ben’s smirk widens even further. “Tell me he’s not hot. I’ll wait.”

Silence reigns again, this time for much less of a pause than before. Klaus slowly pushes his aching body into a seated position. “I hate you,” he mutters. Ben only laughs, disappearing a few minutes later when Klaus finally manages to make it to his feet. 

* * *

“I’m Klaus—“

“Hi, Klaus.”

“—and I’ve been sober for two weeks.” 

This meeting is smaller than the last one. Klaus recognises the same teenage girl from before, now sitting two empty chairs away from him, and also Dave, who is once again right across the circle. Marietta gives him an encouraging smile when his gaze flickers over towards her. 

“I wouldn’t normally come to one of these so late—“ Klaus shivers, drawing further in on himself. “—but I’m about this close—“ He places his shaking thumb and forefinger centimetres apart from each other. “—to just saying ‘fuck it’ and starting back in on whatever I can find, so… here I am.” It’s weak, it sucks, and it’s the  _ truth.  _ Klaus doesn’t know if he’s ever felt so goddamn raw. “I haven’t eaten anything in… almost three days?” He shrugs off the fact that he can’t remember when his last meal had been. “And I haven’t slept in a week. I’m tired and I’ve thrown up nothing but bile all day and I just…” He shakes his head, trailing off into nothingness. After the couple of weeks he’s had, he’s pretty sure it’s well-deserved. 

“Shit,” someone murmurs. Klaus glances up to see Dave’s gaze on him, soft and warm. He’s got a nice face, Klaus thinks distractedly. Nice eyes. A nice nose. A nice chin. 

He’s got nice lips, too. Klaus hasn’t kissed anyone in awhile. He’d like to kiss those lips. 

“ _ Focus _ ,” he hears someone hiss next to his ear, and he startles violently. When he looks over, Ben is sitting in the chair beside him with a disapproving look on his face. 

Marietta is looking at him expectantly. Klaus blinks at her. 

“Sorry, I— zoned out for a second. What?”

She smiles, shakes her head. “It’s alright. I said, we’re glad that you’re here with us tonight. Is there anything else you’d like to share?”

_ The only dead person I’ve seen so far this time around is my brother, but it’s only a matter of time before the rest of them start coming and I’m terrified for what’ll happen to me when they do.  _ “No. Thank you.”

“Alright,” Marietta says, and the shares continue. 

* * *

Klaus doesn’t stand up when the meeting ends, mostly because he’s so far inside of his own head that he hasn’t even registered Marietta releasing them. He jumps when a small hand settles cautiously on his shoulder. 

“Um, Klaus, right?” It’s the teenage girl. Klaus does his best to focus on her face. “You looked like you were spacing, but we’re free to go. Figured someone oughtta let you know, or whatever.”

Klaus swallows dryly. “Thanks,” he rasps out. She nods a little absently and pats his shoulder once before walking past him and out of the room. 

“That was nice of her,” Ben comments. Klaus ignores him in favour of dragging himself up to his feet. The sooner he leaves, the sooner he can go back to curling up on his bathroom floor and wasting away to the sound of Ben’s loudly-voiced disappointment. 

A wave of nausea combats a wave of dizziness when he finally manages to get vertical. His head spikes with a hot lance of pain, and his weak grip on the back of his chair isn’t enough to keep himself upright long. Instead, Klaus tilts dangerously towards the ground, stumbling backwards to try and keep his feet from falling out from under him. He feels a little like he’s ice skating, except the chill in his body is coming entirely from inside of him instead of from a block of ice and some nice winter weather. 

Klaus braces himself for an inevitable meeting with the room’s nasty linoleum tiles. His resolve to keep from falling is gone the second it arrives; the split-second of self-preservation is too good to last, he thinks to himself wryly. He’s never been very good at keeping himself safe. Why should now be any different? 

The expected pain from smashing into the ground doesn’t come, though. Instead, a strong arm wraps around Klaus’ waist, keeping him easily from the decidedly awful spill. A second hand curls around one of his own bony shoulders, the touch as gentle as it is warm. 

Klaus looks up into his saviour’s face with bleary eyes, and Dave smiles. 

“Y’know, people don’t usually fall this fast for me,” he jokes. His voice is just as warm as his touch, as his smile, and it makes Klaus want to melt further into his arms and ask him to never let go. The smile begins to fade into soft concern. “You alright, dove?”

_ God,  _ Klaus isn’t sure he’s not dreaming. “No,” he replies before his brain can catch up with his mouth. His voice cracks on the word. “Sorry, I—“ He’s instructing his body to move, but his limbs —sluggish and heavy as they are— don’t seem inclined to cooperate anytime soon. If he’s still curled up on the floor of his bathroom, passed out and choking to death on his own vomit, then he’s going to live the rest of his short life in this happy little fantasy, real life be fairly damned. 

“Hang on, it’s okay.” Dave sounds so  _ understanding  _ that Klaus almost starts crying on the spot. “Take a breath, yeah? Don’t try and force yourself to sprint when you can barely stand. I’ve got you.”

Klaus does what he’s told, breathing in and out deeply in one conscious cycle before nodding slowly. “Sorry,” he rasps again. 

Dave shakes his head. “No, it’s— I get it,” he says, and even though he’s one of the more put-together people Klaus has ever seen at one of these meetings, Klaus believes him on instinct. He’s still  _ at the meeting,  _ even if he’s got a nice haircut and a suit jacket. (That he isn’t wearing right now, Klaus observes somewhere in the back of his mind. Instead, Dave is wearing sweats and a sweater, which he supposes makes sense, given the time. He’s still hot as fuck.) 

He takes his hand off of Klaus’ shoulder (Klaus wants to sob at the loss) and gestures vaguely to the rest of the room. “This whole thing… It ain’t easy.” 

Klaus swallows back a reply he knows he shouldn’t blurt out. Instead of speaking, he carefully tests his weight between his feet, and Dave lets him go slowly, like he’s making sure that Klaus is really ready to stand on his own before he sets him free. When they’re finally apart, two men standing on their own two feet in the empty room where NA meetings are held, Dave offers him another one of those stupidly charming smiles. 

Klaus wants to bottle the way they make him feel and drink them when he’s all alone. 

“Do you want to get a bite to eat with me?” Dave asks after a too-long beat of silence goes on between them. “I know it’s early—“ And it  _ is  _ technically early, now, Klaus realises: it’ll probably be dawn soon, if he has any functioning sense of time still left at all. “—but I know a great little diner around the corner, and… No offense, but you seem like you could use at least a cup of coffee.”

Klaus wants nothing more than to eat with this beautiful stranger every day for the rest of his life. He nearly says as much, too, until he catches sight of Ben standing behind Dave, holding his pants pockets out in the universal  _ no cash  _ signal. 

Right. 

“I can’t,” Klaus says hesitantly, looking down. “It’s— It’s not that I don’t want to, but I—“

“It’s on me,” Dave interrupts before Klaus can continue. Klaus jerks his head back up so quickly that his knees threaten to give out from the sudden motion. Dave is wearing that soft, understanding smile again. “Don’t worry about it. I’m asking you to come with me, I’ll buy. Okay?”

Klaus is  _ certain  _ that he’s dreaming, but it’s such a nice dream that he doesn’t even think he minds. “...Okay, then,” he says, a little dumbly, and then allows Dave to lead him out of the community centre with a puppy-dog look in his eyes that he can’t quite keep from showing.

* * *

Of course, Klaus isn’t able to keep himself from asking Dave his burning question indefinitely. He makes it through the short walk to Dave’s preferred diner (a little place called Sal’s that Klaus hadn’t even known existed) and all the way through sitting down and ordering before it finally becomes too much to hold back. 

“You’re an addict?” he asks, and immediately regrets the way the words have fallen like acid from his tongue. “I mean— Uh, that’s not what I meant.”

Dave, thankfully, doesn’t look offended. He actually laughs, in a low, quiet chuckle that makes Klaus want to melt all over again. “Not anymore,” he says, and Klaus can sense the honestly in his voice without doing any work to try and tell if he’s lying. Dave seems more open than anyone Klaus has met in a terribly long time (or maybe ever), and every single thing he says makes Klaus more strongly resolve to do whatever it takes to keep on hearing his voice forever. “I used to be, though.”

“I know I should know, but… How long ago?”

“Five years, give or take,” Dave replies. He shrugs off Klaus’ surprised look and continues, “I don’t think I started paying attention to anyone else’s shares until I’d been clean at least six months. It’s a little hard to focus when you’re so strung out on withdrawal that everything’s blurry.” 

Ben, sitting at the top of the booth with his legs crossed at the ankles beside Dave, nods sagely. Klaus ignores his knowing look and focuses on Dave, because he needs the goddamn distraction like he needs air. More, actually, because right now he’d definitely take being asphyxiated over even the thought of having to leave Dave’s side at some point. 

“Why do you keep coming?”

Dave shrugs. “Honestly? Habit,” he says, and Klaus gives a tiny jerk of his head to concede the point. For an addict, going to meetings is probably the best and healthiest habit that can possibly form. “That, and it’s kinda nice to have structure,” he adds, a thoughtful look crossing his features. “I wound up on the streets after I came back from serving—“ Klaus blinks. Dave being a war veteran isn’t exactly the kind of story he’d expected from the clean-cut business-looking man from their first shared meeting. “—because even though I was technically honourably discharged, apparently nobody wants a gay fallen soldier hanging around making the rest of the ‘real’ vets uncomfortable. So I dicked around for awhile and got high a lot, and then had an entire month where I slowly got angrier at myself for being addicted to so much shit, until I finally rolled into a hospital one night at three in the morning and demanded them to put me in rehab.” 

“Did they?” Klaus asks breathlessly, staring in utter rapture at the beautiful apparent-disaster before him. He barely acknowledges their waitress dropping two steaming mugs down on the table, and only vaguely registers Dave waving a hand at her in thanks. 

Dave chuckles, and Klaus manages a weak smile, because Dave’s laughter is stupidly contagious. “They did,” he confirms. “So I lived in hospitals and rehab centres for about six months, and found Marietta about three months into that whole stint. I don’t know if I would have gotten my life together the way it is now if it hadn’t been for her,” he says, and there’s a soft, raw quality to the way Dave says it that makes Klaus both sure that he’s being honest and also bitterly jealous about it, regardless of whether or not it’s his place to be. 

“Don’t look at me like that!” Dave says with a laugh a moment later, and Klaus physically runs a hand over his face to double check the look he’s wearing. He’s not used to being read so easily by anyone but Ben. “It’s not like that, Klaus. I needed support, and she was there to give it.” He grins, cheeky and mischievous, and points to himself. “Wounded gay soldier, remember?”

Klaus feels himself flush, and automatically takes a sip of his coffee to avoid responding immediately. It burns his tongue, but he  _ feels  _ the heat of the drink sliding down his throat, so it’s… good. 

He’s pretty goddamn sure he’s in  _ love,  _ which is decidedly less good. 

Dave laughs again and shakes his head, and he doesn’t stare expectantly at Klaus when he finally puts his mug down again. In fact, he seems more than content to just sit there across from him. Klaus is buzzing, but whether it’s from the immediate effects of the caffeine he’s just shoved into his system or the withdrawal or the feeling of  _ feelings  _ floating around in his head, he isn’t quite sure. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be contagious, because Dave doesn’t look the slightest bit bothered by this new silence between them. 

Two plates of too-greasy diner food arrive before Klaus thinks of something to say, so he tucks in as quickly as his abused stomach will allow in lieu of attempting to open his mouth for any other purpose. 

* * *

Dave offers to walk him home, which is sweet, and which Klaus appreciates, because he’s not entirely sure that his breakfast is altogether agreeing with him. His stomach protests in quiet groans and incredibly painful cramps as they walk side-by-side in the muted light of dawn. 

Halfway through the journey, Dave wraps an arm around his shoulders. Klaus is pretty sure he’s melted completely into Dave’s side by the time they reach his door. 

“It’s not much, but you’re free to come inside,” Klaus offers, trying valiantly to ignore the loud, obnoxious complaining of his poor internal organs. Dave smiles warmly. 

“Thank you—“ Dave begins, but the second Klaus crosses the threshold, he knows instinctively that he  _ needs to book it to the bathroom, fuck fuck fuck  _ and he’s already leaping clumsily past him and dropping his bag full of to-go boxes that Dave had insisted he take home with him on the floor as he sprints wildly for the half-open door. 

He’s heaving by the time he drops painfully to his knees in front of the toilet, and he’s ridiculously glad that he never bothers to put the seat down, because if it hadn’t already been ready to receive, Klaus is pretty sure there wouldn’t have been time to prepare. His roiling stomach expels his whole meager breakfast —scrambled eggs and dry toast, and the coffee— before he flushes the knob with trembling fingers even as he continues to dry-heave and spit up bile. 

Klaus is almost able to forget about the handsome man he’s left unceremoniously in the doorway of his apartment, which is why he’s so fucking shocked when suddenly, there’s one hand deftly brushing his hair from his face and into a makeshift bun at the back of his head, and another hand rubbing soft circles against his upper back. In fact, he nearly chokes on his own vomit at the touch, which is definitely even more disgusting than he’s ever thought it would be. 

There are tears in Klaus’ eyes that he can’t blink away; his throat burns, and his stomach doesn’t feel any better despite its brand-new, empty interior. But Dave is touching him anyways, and he’s touching him like he  _ means  _ something, like he  _ deserves  _ it, and Klaus wants to cry all over again. 

“Sorry,” he half-rasps, half-whispers. 

Dave fingers stroke calmly through his hair, ignoring the places they catch on tangles or patches that are greasy from poor washing. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he replies, and it’s so goddamn  _ natural  _ coming from him that Klaus doesn’t manage to hold back a sob. 

And then, he sobs again, and again, because  _ fuck,  _ he’s sore and tired and disgusting and  _ sad  _ but for the first time, he’s not alone for the moment it all overwhelms him at once. 

Klaus loves Ben to death (hah), he really does, but being alone with his deceased brother who can’t actually touch him to comfort him through his panic attacks versus being alone with an exceedingly handsome gay war vet slash drug addict who somehow got over his addiction who not only  _ can  _ touch him, but that seems to  _ want  _ to? 

Klaus falls the fuck apart. 

And Dave holds him. Dave honest-to-god holds him. Once he seems certain that Klaus is done puking, he maneuvers him so that they’re facing each other and then wraps his arms tightly around Klaus’ shivering form. 

“I know, dove,” Dave murmurs. Klaus buries his face in Dave’s sweater and breathes in the scent of him in through the snot in his nose and cries all over him. 

* * *

At some point, when Klaus has more-or-less stopped snivelling, he feels Dave’s arm reach around him and then hears the toilet flush again. He doesn’t remove his face from where it’s pressed against Dave’s chest, and Dave doesn’t make any attempt to pry him away. 

“I’m going to carry you to your bed, alright?” Dave murmurs. Klaus wants to protest, because he’s a grown-ass adult and he can walk himself to bed, thanks very much, and also he doesn’t know if Dave is going to be able to carry him because… well, people don’t  _ normally  _ pick him up. 

Then again, people don’t normally touch him like this at all, so Klaus supposes Dave has already made it past step one. 

Dave waits a moment before following through, and Klaus sluggishly realises that he’d probably been waiting for the protestation to come. He isn’t physically or mentally able to come up with it, though, so Dave shifts his grip until his arms are beneath Klaus’ legs and back, and then lifts him up and into his arms, bridal style. 

And holy  _ shit,  _ Klaus is being carried. He either weighs less than he thinks he does or Dave is ripped as hell (and he can feel his chest beneath the sweater— he’s actually fairly certain it’s a combination of both) because it doesn’t feel like Dave is expending any actual effort to keep him firmly tucked into his arms. 

“Do you always treat the pretty ones this nice?” he mumbles. He knows it’s muffled, but Dave laughs anyways, a warm chuckle that Klaus feels as well as hears. 

“Just the pretty ones who seem to like me,” he says lightly. 

Klaus feels himself being lowered onto something soft and— oh. They’re in his bedroom. 

All at once, the situation hits Klaus with the force of a head-on trainwreck. A near-stranger is in his apartment, in his  _ bedroom,  _ and he’s just… letting it happen. 

He’s let it happen before, but there are usually more drugs involved. And a lot less sobriety.

Klaus lets go of Dave’s torso and falls back against his mattress, his features twisting. Dave leans back, still smiling warmly, although the expression falters a little when his gaze lands on Klaus’s face. 

“What—?” he begins to ask, but Klaus interrupts him, struggling to push himself upright. 

“You thought you’d get me in here and have your way with me, is that it?” he snarls out. It’s weak, full of the only venom he can manage to produce, and just the act of pushing Dave away like this  _ hurts  _ him more than it should. 

“What?” Dave repeats, this time sounding flabbergasted. He takes a slow, careful step backwards, raising his arms up in a surrender. “Klaus, I didn’t—“

Klaus points at him and loses his balance in the same moment, keeling over rather drunkenly on the bed. He’s lying on his side, now, still pointing vaguely in Dave’s direction. “I see how it is,” he slurs. “You saw one of the famous Umbrella Academy fuckers and thought  _ oh, this will be fun.  _ Well, guess what,  _ Dave?  _ I’ve played this game before.” He shudders, drawing his arm back in towards his body. “Fuck, I’m so  _ stupid.”  _

“Yes, you are,” Ben says, appearing suddenly in the doorway from wherever the fuck he’d been hanging out. “He’s trying to  _ help you,  _ Klaus.”

Meanwhile, understanding finally dawns on Dave’s face, and he shakes his head rapidly, dropping his arms from the surrender to cross them in front of himself. “No! No, it’s not like that at all. I’m just… trying to help, I promise. I can leave, if you’re more comfortable with it.” He takes another step backwards, towards the door. 

“Breathe, Klaus. Stop panicking and  _ think.  _ He isn’t trying to hurt you,” Ben fires off rapidly. 

Klaus doesn’t remember squeezing his eyes shut, but they’re closed tightly, and he’s curled up in a foetal position. He’s trembling from cold, from anxiety, from the stress, and even when he opens his eyes, he isn’t sure that what he’s seeing is real. 

A woman is leaning against his dresser, her throat slashed and her body long and lean. 

A child is rocking back and forth on the floor near the window, whispering something Klaus doesn’t want to hear. 

Ben is standing in the doorway, his eyes wide. 

Dave is taking another step away. 

“Stop!” Klaus cries out suddenly. 

Just like that, the woman vanishes. The child stops his rocking and stares up at Klaus curiously before fading away. Ben gives him a pitying look. And Dave…

Dave freezes on the spot, obviously unsure. 

“I’m sorry,” Klaus whispers after a moment of silence. “I’m sorry, I— I overreacted, I appreciate your help. Please— Please don’t leave me alone. I can’t— I need you to stay.”

“Klaus, I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Dave says slowly. “I don’t want you to think I’m taking advantage of you. I—“

“No,” Klaus interrupts again. “No, you’re not. I know that you’re not.” Ben’s insistence is a good indicator of that, at the very least, and the fact that Klaus is so fucking  _ cold  _ without Dave’s warm presence beside him is also aiding in his sudden surety. He’s always prided himself on his ability to judge people’s characters, even if he’s spent a good amount of time ignoring the warning bells in the back of his head. Dave didn’t set off any of those alarms, not when they’d first met, not in the diner, and not now. 

Dave still doesn’t look certain, but he does drop his arms. He slowly takes a hesitant step back towards the bed. 

“I’m sorry for freaking out,” Klaus repeats. It bears repeating, because Dave looks about as freaked out as Klaus had been only seconds earlier. He starts to say something else, then coughs, using every ounce of energy left in his exhausted body to flip over onto his back. He feels a little like a beetle. “I’ve had some nasty experiences like you wouldn’t believe.” He pauses, considering. “Or maybe you might.”

“...I might,” Dave concedes, and he still sounds careful, but his voice comes from right beside the bed, which eases Klaus’ worries more than anything else. “You’re completely right in being cautious. But I wouldn’t— I couldn’t do something like… that.”

Klaus shakes his head. He can feel his hair pulling where it’s trapped beneath his skull. “No, you don’t seem the type.”

The bed dips. Klaus reaches blindly in the general direction of the new weight, searching weakly for Dave’s presence. 

A strong hand grips his own clammy, trembling one, and Klaus breathes out a sigh of relief and relaxes a little more into the mattress. 

“If you’ve got things to do, you’re not obligated to stay,” Klaus adds, his tripping loosely over the longest word in the sentence.

Dave shifts, and after a few moments, he swings his legs up onto the bed. Klaus can see his feet, now clothed in only socks, and makes the assumption that he’s toed off his shoes to stay awhile. “No, I’m alright to stay, if you’ll have me.”

“Cuddle me?” Klaus asks. The question pops unbidden from between his lips, but he makes no effort to take them back. Letting them hang out in the open is much easier. 

To his credit, Dave doesn’t seem discomfited by the idea. Instead, he nods slowly, and the next thing Klaus knows, those strong arms are manhandling him until he’s curled up snugly in Dave’s embrace. 

He nuzzles his face right into the side of Dave’s neck. “Mm, this is nice,” he slurs. He feels miraculously warm, and even though his body is still shaking, it’s somehow much more tolerable with Dave holding onto him. 

Dave hums back in response and tightens his arms, his grip so close to protective that Klaus nearly begins to cry again. 

Crying is a bad option. Klaus decidedly does not  _ want  _ to cry all over this handsome, strong, beautiful near-stranger, so he closes his eyes and sighs heavily. “Might fall asleep,” he admits. 

Dave’s fingers slide back into his hair. “You deserve it.”

Klaus knows he tries to respond, but his brain seems to disconnect from his mouth, because he’s not sure if the reply actually makes it into the air or not. Either way, he finds himself sliding down a slippery slope into sleep, lulled into dreamland by Dave’s warm, steady presence. 

* * *

“My name is Klaus—“

“Hi, Klaus.”

“—and I’ve been sober for one year, exactly, today.”

There’s polite applause around the group. Marietta beams at him from across the circle, so Klaus grins back. Smiling comes easier to him, these days. 

Dave slings an arm casually over the back of his shitty plastic folding chair and squeezes his shoulder, and Klaus’ smile gets wider. Yeah, smiling comes  _ much  _ easier to him, nowadays. 

“We’re so proud of you, Klaus,” Marietta says, and Klaus thanks her. His share today is short, because he’s been talking about his and Dave’s upcoming move into a new apartment for weeks and he’s absolutely certain nobody wants to hear anything else about it. 

“Hi, I’m Dave—“

“Hi, Dave,” the group choruses. Klaus’ voice joins in with the rest of the monotonous greeting. 

“—and I’ve been sober for about six years.”

Dave’s share is almost shorter than Klaus’ own. They’ve both been too excited about the move to talk about anything else, but Dave does mention the possible promotion at work that he’d mentioned to Klaus the day before, which has Klaus squeezing his thigh lightly, proudly. 

They leave the meeting hand in hand, with an offered invitation to anyone who cares to join them to meet at Sal’s for a cup of coffee and a bite to eat. Nobody else from their group accepts today, but Klaus doesn’t mind it much. It just means more time that he gets Dave to himself. 

Well, to himself and Ben. 

He’s been working on manifesting him, ever since the first accidental time three months into sobriety when Dave had walked into Klaus’ apartment to find a complete stranger curled up on the couch reading a book while Klaus showered. 

That had… taken some explaining. But Dave knew who Ben was, based on the knowledge he had from childhood of the Umbrella Academy and their heroic endeavours. 

As it is, they make their way into Sal’s and then Klaus manifests Ben into the booth beside Dave, who doesn’t even startle anymore when it happens. Instead, he just grins and passes the menu Ben’s way. 

Klaus watches them both from across the table with a big, dumb, sappy grin spread thick like peanut butter all over his face. A year ago, he’d been more fucked up than an orphanage on fire. If anyone had told him he’d meet the love of his life  _ and  _ start to gain control of his abilities when he was sober… Well, he can’t say he would’ve listened to them, because he’s pretty sure Diego tried to hit him with shit like that back in their Academy days. But still. 

Dave reaches across the table without breaking in his conversation with Ben about some book Klaus hasn’t heard of, and Klaus takes the searching hand in his own and laces their fingers together. This is his life now. This is  _ their  _ life now. And Klaus is more glad than he’s ever expected himself to be to live it. 

**Author's Note:**

> This wasn’t supposed to be this long and yet... here we are. 
> 
> Kudos/comments are love! Come scream at me on tumblr @deathishauntedbyhumans.


End file.
